At least 50 Sharia judges from Kaduna and Kano States have been trained in Gender-Based Violence (GBV) as part of efforts to prevent its escalation in Northern Nigeria.
Speaking at the one-day seminar for the Sharia judges at Bafara Hotel, Kaduna at the weekend, the Project Coordinator, Ahmad Abdullahi Ahmad, said the seminar, which was sponsored by the Department of Research and Projects Centre (dRPC), aimed to enhance the judges’ understanding of the Islamic perspective on GBV.
According to him: “What you are seeing today is the outcome of a peer-to-peer study tour undertaken by Muslim opinion leaders and Imams to Egypt. While in Egypt, they engaged with esteemed Islamic institutions like Al-Azhar and the Grand Mufti. The insights and lessons learned from that experience gave birth to this training.”
“We are not here to teach you (the judges) what to do, but we are here to enhance your understanding of how you can improve your knowledge of the legal frameworks regarding GBV.”
He said the training was also intended to improve their understanding of how Islamic principles can be utilized alongside legal mechanisms to prevent harm to women and girls.
According to him, “Fifty Sharia court judges drawn from Kano and Kaduna participated in the seminar.”
During the training of the 40 Imams drawn from Kano and Kaduna, Kano Commissioner for Religious Affairs, Ahmed Tijjani Auwal lamented women in Northern Nigeria, were being neglected, abused and denied a lot of opportunities in terms of education, empowerment and jobs.
“We are dealing with prevention of GBV more especially in the northern part of the country, we are looking a what Islam says about cases of GBV. What Islam says to protect women and children from several cases of sexual violence cases, domestic violence and psychological abuse.
“The development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC) has put a lot of efforts by taking delegation to Egypt sponsored by them. We learnt a lot from Islamic scholars in Egypt . The purpose of this training is to step down all we learnt in Egypt to our Imams more especially the Imams that come from rural areas where there is so much lack of education and so much lack of awareness on the issue of women.
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“Women are being neglected, abused, denied a lot of opportunities in terms of education, empowerment, jobs etc. This is very important because after carefully selected this Imams , they have the capacity to spread the message to other Imams. Some perceive Islam as giving men advantage over the women, which most of our people interpret wrongly so, it doesn’t say that that a man is more powerful than a woman in the sense she can take anything the man imposed on her, it’s not like that. We learn a lot.
“They opened our eyes in Egypt more especially on verses of Holy Quran and Hadith of Holy prophet that talked about the rights of women and children. We are going to give them more understanding on those verses and what they mean. There are lot of question where inheritance comes, in Islam inheritance . They are a lot of places where women take more than the men in inheritance and we have verses to back it up. dRPC is taking the right step in the right direction in trying to take the women out of the bush.
“We are also going to tell the women on how to asses their own rights Islamically without over stepping their boundaries. When we talk of gender, we are talking about male and female. We have seen boys been abused. We are trying to protect them. The existing laws are weak and we have seen a lot development in terms of laws and health because when we talk about women we talk about health,” he said.